Tag Archives: call to participate

call to participate: a year of feminist classics

28 Tuesday Dec 2010

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two young women (unfinished)
by kobanashikaoru @ Flickr.com

As I posted earlier in December on tumblr, a group of women have established a blog / reading group called A Year of Feminist Classics, where they plan to read and blog for twelve months (beginning January 2011) about a series of feminist texts.

You can sign up as part of the reading group here, but drop-ins are welcome. Check out their final reading list here if you think you might be interested in dropping by for one or two specific months out of the twelve.

They’ll be kicking things off in January with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).  If you’re like me, you may well want an actual physical copy of the text in which to take notes in the margins and dog-ear (much to my girlfriend’s horror).  But for any of you who don’t have the money to purchase a copy, who can’t locate one through your local library, etc., here are a few places you can access the full text online:

Internet Archive (various formats to read online and download)

LibraVox (MP3 audio download)

Project Gutenberg (various formats to read online and download)

I’ve signed up and plan to participate in at least a handful of months — depending on my other obligations and the book scheduled. I look forward to chatting with at least some of you there!

quick hit: interviews with grown unschoolers

04 Saturday Dec 2010

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Blogger Idzie @ I’m Unschooled. Yes, I Can Write is running a new (and hopefully ongoing) series of interviews with grown unschoolers. I sent her my responses on Saturday and look for a post later this week sharing what I wrote (and cross-linking with her blog).  In the meantime, here’s the first of the published interviews with one Hanna Thompson, as Idzie writes, is a “world traveler and aspiring medical doctor.”A few excerpts:

Have you found that unschooling has had an impact on how hard or easy it is to get jobs or earn money?
It’s much easier being unschooled to find a job than if I was attending school. One reason is that with unschooling you actually have time to have a job, and I’ve found that my interpersonal skills which I attribute to unschooling, have made me very marketable in the jobs that I’m working.

What impact do you feel unschooling has had on your life?
My unschooling experience has taught me to follow my passion without restraint. The freedom of this type of education has given me the time to explore interests and form concrete ideas about what I want to achieve.

What advice would you give to unschooling parents (or parents looking into unschooling)?
Unschooling is about helping your child grow and expand their horizons, institutionalized schooling is about prolonging childhood indefinitely, so be your child’s facilitator, get involved with them, find opportunities for them, and let them pursue their own. Just let them grow.

You can check out the whole response at Idzie’s blog and look for more installments in the future.

Also, if any of you reading this are or have been unschoolers, do participate in the series! You can find the original call for responses and the blank questionnaire by clicking through.

call for participation: study of engaged couples

09 Tuesday Nov 2010

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Essin’ Em over at Sexuality Happens brought my attention to a study being done of couples who intend to get married within the next year. The researcher writes:

I am looking for volunteers for a study of attitudes towards marriage and parenthood among engaged couples. The study consists of a 25-30 minute online survey. To qualify for the study, you must be 20-35 years old, live in the U.S., and plan to marry or have a commitment ceremony within the next 365 days. You and your romantic partner must not have children, and this must be the first marriage for both of you.

The sex/gender of the individuals in the couple do not matter; no mention is made in the call for participants about poly relationships, but if you’re in one and otherwise fit the bill I’d encourage you to contact the researcher and offer yourselves as part of the sample. The more diverse the sample population, the more interesting the end result will be.

You can read a bit more about the study (and get contact details) over at Sexuality Happens.

saturday survey: librarians, archivists and historians as activists

06 Saturday Nov 2010

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My history adviser, Laura Prieto, alerted me to this survey being done on librarians, archivists and historians as activists in preparation for a conference paper to be delivered at a meeting at the University of Dundee, Scotland, in December. From the solicitation email:

If you are a historian or archivist, broadly defined, and you consider yourself an activist, we invite you to fill out a survey about your experiences. The definition of “activist” that we are using is “an especially active, vigorous advocate of a cause, esp. a political cause.” This survey is being collected for a study of historians and archivists as activists. The survey explores the ways in which people participate as activists and the consequences for their employers and themselves. We anticipate this survey will take approximately 20 minutes to complete.

Although the email only indicates archivists and historians, the actual questions about occupation include “librarian.”

The researchers doing the study are:

Bea Hardy, Interim Dean of University Libraries
College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, VA

Sonia Yaco, Special Collections Librarian and University Archivist
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, VA

If you feel you fit the bill and have twenty minutes to spare, help bolster their sample size!

UPDATE: Again, the survey can be found online here: https://forms.wm.edu/997. I neglected to put the link in earlier due to my lack of black tea and the earliness of the Saturday-morning hour :). Thanks to Hanna for alerting me!

quick hit: call for orgasm essays

28 Wednesday Jul 2010

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Via the Good Vibes blog.

From sexuality educator and columnist Midori.

I am collecting women’s accounts of the physical experience their orgasms. I’m really hoping that some of you can help me out with this. Feel free to pass it on to any women or lists with women who might be interested.

Details –

I am seeking first person descriptions from women about their orgasms.

Who: You are a woman, 18 years or older, who have experienced one or more variety of orgasms. (Transwomen! I want your unique perspectives too!)

What: Essay of clear and detailed description of your orgasm, from start to finish, focusing on the physical experience, expressed in your own words. When does it start? What’s the hint of it? Where does it start? How does it move through your body? What sort of sensations? Imagine trying to illustrate your orgasm to a person who’s never had it.

If you have more than one type of orgasm, each variety would be written in a separate essay piece. (The get-to-sleep quickie, the deep one, the surprise one, the long building one, solo-sex one, when getting oral sex, etc…)

How Long? As long as it takes for you to describe it. It may be a couple of paragraphs or couple of pages.

Credit line: How would you like your essay to be credited? You’ll have one or two lines.

Editing: At most I will edit for grammar, spelling and simple readability. I want to keep it as true to your original narrative and tone as possible.

When: No later than end of August

Send to midori AT fhp-inc DOT com

Please make sure that there’s an e mail I can reliable reach you at. I may have some questions around editing or some other detail.

I’m happy to answer any questions on this.

Thank you!

Midori

quick hit: Heather Corinna’s casual sex survey

06 Saturday Mar 2010

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via aag

The awesome sexuality educator and activist Heather Corinna, recently interviewed by Chloe @ Feministing, is conducting a survey on attitudes toward, and experiences of, casual sex. The survey is web-based, anonymous, and takes about 20-40 minutes to complete (depending on the speed of your computer and how much you want to write in the open-ended questions). Anyone over the age of sixteen who has ever had a sexual experience involving another person (so anything other than masturbation) is encouraged to respond.

Heather Corinna is trying to gather information on multigenerational attitudes toward casual (not in the context of a commited relationship) sex and how those who engage in casual sexual encounters feel about those experiences. The current media panic about young adult “hook up” culture focuses almost exclusively on heterosexual white women and assumes that casual sexual encounters are threatening to young women’s sexual pleasure and ability to form (if desired) more lasting relationships. Corinna hopes to provide a more nuanced perspective of the actual practice of casual sex without the burden of these moralistic assumptions. As Corinna herself writes:

There’s a lot of buzz right now about “hooking up,” the newest term for casual sex, though casual sex isn’t new at all — nor does it only belong to the current generation, despite often being presented that way. Unlike a lot of the buzz out there, I’m not interested in telling anyone how to have sex or in presenting any one kind of sex as the one ” best way.” I’m just looking for what’s real, both in sexual attitudes and personal experiences.

Rather, I’m doing this study to try and gather data on multigenerational experiences and attitudes with/about casual sex so as to discover and present a more diverse, realistic and non-prescriptive picture of people’s sex lives and ideas about sex. The data will ideally be used for publication, but your answers are completely anonymous and will only be used anonymously.

Since the study will be most informative if the respondants are drawn from a diversity of political, cultural, generational, etc., background, I encourage you to take the survey and pass it along to anyone you feel comfortable introducing the project to. Yes, this includes your socially conservative grandmother, your teenage brother, or your Church pastor.